Part of my spiritual practice includes lectio divina, or sacred reading. I read a few verses from scripture at a time and ponder them in order to hear God's voice speaking through them.Today I read in the second chapter of the Gospel according to Luke, "This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in bands of cloth and lying in a manger."It's so familiar from Christmastime that its oddness almost escapes notice.Why would God's sign to the world be a just-born infant wrapped up like the dead, laid in a feeding trough for large animals? Why would a bunch of sheep-herders run at the chance to see this so-called sign?If you don't know that this child is destined from his birth for death, the mummy look doesn't make sense. If you don't know that by losing his life, this child will become food for all who hunger, this doesn't make sense. How can this bizarre telling of a child's birth make any sense without knowing the whole story that is to come?What signs and wonders does God leave for me to see that I don't yet understand? How do I develop the imagination to see what they could mean and to strive for what God is setting in motion?

It feels like a blur.Didn't my family just arrive in the desert yesterday? Didn't we just experience the St. Brigid Thursday night community for the first time? Didn't each of my tiny daughters receive their first communion a moment ago from the hands of those gathered in Heidi Chapel?St. Brigid, the small gathering of young adults and families from ASU Episcopal Campus Ministry and St. Augustine's Church, passed away last night. We built an altar of stones as a sacred tribute, and my not-quite-one-year-old splashed the bowl of water that bore the stones with which we built it.I have watched my daughters engage the sacramental life in this community. My baby, who was barely four months old when we first visited, took her first steps in front of the St. Brigid community last night, blazing a sacred trail around the room and climbing into the lap of our priest during the eucharistic prayer as unabashed concelebrant. Both of my daughters have inspired the breaking open of the word. Both of my daughters have broken the bread. Both of my daughters have shared gestures, looks, and wise words to give a roomful of adults pause. Both of my daughters have done what the older children did before them.Her precise words escape me, but my toddler said last night, during the breaking of bread, "Ooh, bread! It's so good!" And later, as she ate, she said, "Oh, my God!" And I said, "Oh, your God." I don't know what their liturgical formation will look like anymore beyond Sunday Mass, but I know that my daughters have walked and danced with the wild Spirit over these last eight months, and they have been met with wings of welcome and delight. Their lives will never be the same.And neither will mine.But the past isn't the end of the story--it marks the beginning of a new story. What will come next? How will I, their mother and on-hand liturgist, continue what the Spirit has inspired?Where does the story turn next?

What's in a name?Since the last solemn profession held in my Benedictine Canon community, my Benedictine brothers have started to embrace their religious names more fully. In my community, each brother has taken a religious name at his solemn profession, becoming Brother First name-Religious name (so Br. Philip, at his profession in March, became Br. Philip-Martín).I've given a good deal of thought to the religious name I would take at my solemn profession. I've given less thought, at least until now, to my given first name. I go by a shortened version of my middle name--I have since college. My first name connoted too many aspects of my childhood self that I no longer embraced, so I dropped it, and only a few people call me by it anymore.I wonder now if continuing to eschew my first name is a sign of my rejection of part of myself. Am I at a point where I can embrace who I was as a child--meek, silent, shy, gullible, frail? Why would I ever embrace those things as a feminist seeking a position of leadership?I doubt I'll ever return to my first name, especially if I make my solemn profession (because three names is a little much, no?), but I cannot so easily ignore the person I was for nearly two decades. What do I need to reclaim about my childhood self? What do I fear?

This is my last day as a Roman Catholic.Tomorrow I will be received into the Episcopal Church by Bishop Kirk Smith of the Episcopal Diocese of Arizona, thus continuing my baptismal journey, continuing my journey as a novice of the Community of St. Mary of the Annunciation Benedictine Canons, and beginning my journey in a new-to-me Christian tradition.I am continually surprised at the deep connections I find between my adult faith and the faith of my childhood. I am about to enter the Episcopal Church, a church that liturgically isn't very different from the Roman Catholic tradition. My devotion to a relational, triune God was established before I knew it on Trinity Sunday, the day of my baptism. And my formation in the Community of St. Mary of the Annunciation Benedictine Canons, whose devotion is to God's preeminent open-hearted listener, the Theotokos, began not during my years of graduate study at St. John's School of Theology in Collegeville, Minnesota, but at my baptismal church, St. Mary of the Annunciation Church in Greenville, Ohio.My Prior suggests that synchronicities such as these are worth attending to. I have always been a fan of synchronicity--I have just never experienced so much of it in one place as I have in the Sonoran Desert these last five months. All the threads of my life of faith--the threads of liturgical practice, structured prayer, understanding of God as relational/transcendent/imminent, singing, feminism, openness, commitment to the seeking of truth in all places and people, and humility in the presence of God's wondrous deeds--all of these and more are woven into the pattern of my faith life at St. Augustine's and as a Benedictine Canon Novice of St. Mary of the Annunciation. And the pattern they weave takes my breath away.I say farewell to the Roman Catholic Church in kindness and love, and I greet the Episcopal Church with fondness and hope. I trust that my almost thirty-two years as a Roman Catholic Christian have not been in vain, but instead have created a strong foundation on which I can build a stronger faith.

I want to pause for a minute and think about the way my new title of "Sister" changes things for me.Now that I am "Sister" to those in my community, those who are "Brother" in that community are my brothers. They're confreres. They're bros. They're family. I even get to see them with relative frequency--once or twice or even thrice a week, sometimes.I'm holding my new chosen-sibling relationship with them in tension with my vows of stability, conversion, and obedience. I'm promising to be here for them. I'm promising to keep trying to be a better sister to them. And I'm promising to listen to them, even when I don't want to.I'm learning how to be a sister in a new way. I'm a sister to four childhood siblings, but growing up, stability, conversion, and obedience played very little role in my relationship with them. I was a loner, I did what I wanted, and I didn't listen when it didn't suit me.Will my identity as "Sister" in this community change my identity as sister in my childhood family? I don't know. But here's a change I am noticing since my vows last Sunday: when I pray for others now, I don't just pray for those I find easy to love. I lift up the names of those my heart has closed off. Every day, I punch the steely walls of my heart in order to pray for those whom I don't want to love, don't want to be there for, don't want to be better for the sake of, and don't want to listen to.My prayers may not change the ones I pray for, and they may not change my relationships with those people, but my prayers for those others are changing me. Despite my inclination to resist, the vows I uphold are tearing down my defenses, exposing my vulnerabilities, and rending my heart for love's sake.

In my almost thirty-two years as a Roman Catholic, I have never been prouder of any pope. Granted, I've only encountered three in my lifetime, but I am also a student of Christian history. You stand out among your predecessors.

You have rocked the entire world with your embodied proclamations of the good news. You kiss the wounds of the sick. You share tables with those who have neither tables of their own nor food to put on them. You warn your clergy again and again against the glamour of clericalism. Your love is abundant, like Christ's was and is, and I have seen it have a multiplying effect, even (perhaps especially) among non-Roman Catholics.

I am tremendously grateful to God for your faithful, living witness to the teachings of Jesus. Your heart is wide open, and I feel quite certain that if I happened to walk into your midst, you would smile and greet me with the warmth of an old friend, and I would greet you likewise.

I need to confess something to you. On February 16, 2014, God willing, I will leave my cloak of Roman Catholic identity behind in order to be received as a member of the Episcopal Church.

Despite having spent my entire life as a devoted (albeit flawed) Roman Catholic, I cannot remain Roman Catholic any longer. Because despite the gospel of Jesus you now proclaim miraculously through your very body, and despite the many ways in which I encounter Christ's presence through your holy example, I'm afraid there is at least one way in which you, like most if not all of your predecessors, have failed to hear the voice of God and heed it: in the calling of thousands upon thousands of women around the world to ordained ministry.

I was able to name my own God-given call to ordained ministry thirteen years ago. I was still a teenager then. I am close with several Roman Catholic women who share the same call. Yet you, like your papal predecessors, have dismissed even the possibility that women might be called to ordained ministry.

I don't understand this hardness of heart. Not from you.

What I do understand is how hard it can be to hear God's earnest whispers when so much of one's culture screams against it. My favorite psalm is Psalm 51, because it is a perpetual invitation to be changed, transformed, turned around:

I suspect this psalm is as dear to you as it is to me. Please, then, let God's whispers reach your ear through my meager words: God calls some women to serve as ordained ministers. That the Roman Catholic hierarchy refuses to acknowledge this (or even to discuss it) is gravely sinful. It is presumptuous to deny God's calling to those whom God has chosen.

Please, for God's sake, don't allow whatever is lacking in me cause you to be deaf to what God is speaking to you through me in this moment. If anyone with the authority to effect gospel change in the Roman Catholic Church can hear this prophetic word, I believe you can. Please, open your heart and listen for the sake of my daughters, who will grow up in the midst of your legacy even if they never set foot in a Roman Catholic church.

Please, listen. Listen because you know better than almost anyone that God speaks prophetically through those who are marginalized, women included.

Please, I beg you from the bottom of my heart, listen--allow yourself to be importuned by me, just like the judge was importuned by the widow, or like Jesus was importuned by the woman begging for scraps. You and I both know what happened in those latter two instances. If Jesus' mind could be changed, surely yours can.

I believe that the world-wide turning of hearts to God, if you listened in this one way and acted accordingly, would be a miracle of biblical proportion.

With blessings and love in the One who creates, redeems, and sanctifies all the world,

M. Kate AllenThis letter originally appeared at parentwin.com, where I am a regular contributor on topics of religion. The letter went viral among my Facebook friends and received more discussion and shares there than anything else I've every written, anywhere. A friend of mine encouraged me to mail it to Pope Francis. I did. If he responds, I will share his response here. (Unless he asks me not to.)

While sipping a hot cup of Ten Ren King's tea and chatting with a dear friend from the San Francisco Bay Area on Facebook, my friend wrote this to me:"kate, I am so happy for you - it seems your life is developing in amazing ways"(NB: The editor in me would like to capitalize and punctuate that sentence, but the friend in me knows better.)My friend is right, you know. I'm struck by how very much my life has changed in a very, very short period of time.I started this blog/site two years ago today. I wrote this:

Hurrah! Thanks to the inspiration of a dear friend of mine, Noach, I have planted the seed of this blog (and broader website). I hope it will yield many vibrant, lush, delicious fruits, and perhaps yield some long-lasting connections in the process.

Is it any surprise that the same friend who helped me plant this seed of a website and blog is now bursting with joy for me at what has risen up from the dark, fertile soil of my dreams and yearning?I look back at the woman I was in 2012--a first time mom; an office manager at a small synagogue; a frustrated, well-educated, sad, and increasingly jaded Roman Catholic--and I see someone who knew that 2012 was a beginning rather than an end. I had no real idea of where the road would lead, but I knew I would be creating the road for myself as I went along, and that I would visit some unusual and unfamiliar places along the way.My mantra lately, when folks ask me how I like Arizona, is, "I never thought I'd like living in the desert." But I do. My family is happy here. My husband has a job in which he thrives. I'm able to be at home with my girls for now, do fun-to-me gigs, and write to my heart's content. And finally, at long last, I get to be a both-feet-all-the-way-in member of a religious community in which I am valued, period--no strings attached, no hidden agendas, no glass ceiling. I love this community so much that my heart aches, as if it might burst. It's like being home again, but it's more than that. I'm not just part of the beauty that is my new community; I'm becoming a leader in bringing forth that beauty. Me. A woman. A thirty-something from Ohio who very early on learned to shut up and take it when something or someone wasn't good enough, even when what was good enough was within my reach, and even when what wasn't good enough was sanctioned by my religious leaders.Two years later, in 2014, I find myself in the midst of imperfect, beautiful people, and just by being my own imperfect self, I am amazing. I am vibrant. I am what I was searching for two years ago. It just took being planted in a fertile garden, free of choking weeds, for me to see myself stretched up tall and completely radiant for the first time.

This past Saturday, my family hosted an Advent housewarming, and I found the wreath and berries you see to the left from Trader Joe's. A tiny wreath and a few tea candles make the passage of Advent time more pronounced, and the faint scent of pine reminds me of home.When I was growing up in northeast Ohio, I was surrounded by evergreens. On Earth Day each year it was customary to receive an evergreen sapling from school to plant at home, and my family planted them. One of the most beautiful places in Ohio to see evergreens is Quail Hollow State Park in Hartville; another is the Jesuit Retreat House in Parma. Evergreens like those don't grow in the desert. Instead, the thriving flora of the Sonoran desert include Mediterranean olive trees, which would have been familiar to the eyes and hands and mouth of Jesus of Nazareth.I miss my childhood home enough to buy an evergreen wreath that isn't native to where I live. Maybe next year I'll fashion my own wreath with olive branches and olives. Olive branches have always been a sign of goodwill, and olive oil is a sign of majesty, healing, and nourishment. Appropriate for the season that awaits the arrival of the majestic, healing nourisher, yes?